Ned Beauman - Boxer, Beetle

Pock wasn’t just losing to Sinner — he was being skinned, diced, erased. It seemed to Pock that this hairless runt could see inside him — could see Pock’s memory of his first kiss, or his trick of wiggling his ears in time to a song, or his hatred of cats — could see it, take careful aim, and knock it out of his head like a loose tooth. Soon there would be nothing left of Pock but meat. Never had he felt punches so precise and impatient and cruel. And the other boy was impossibly clean — not a speck of blood on him — and although his bony chest did shine with sweat under the lights, it was a thin, efficient, cooling sweat, not the sour chicken soup that gushed into Pock’s eyes and dripped from his chin and gathered in his shorts to make his cock feel heavier than his fists.

Premierland had once been a warehouse for Fairclough’s, the butcher’s, and if Pock felt like meat then so did many of the thousand people watching him, who were not just packed in together like meat but smoked like meat too, squinting through a blue cigarette fog so dense you could hardly see the steel girders that held up the roof. And if this tiny demon Yid hadn’t decided to give the sell-out crowd a show then Pock wouldn’t have lasted a round, he knew that. But Pock had never, ever been knocked out in the ring, and it wasn’t going to happen tonight, with his husky-squeaky Myrna down there watching — he could never fuck her again if she saw him helpless on his back, fucked. So when the bell rang and Pock staggered back to his corner he didn’t listen to his trainer’s yammering, didn’t take a gulp of water, didn’t even knock his left fist on his right boot like he usually did for luck, he just swore under his breath and stared across the ring at Sinner, who stared back from his stool, expressionless, one arm draped over the ropes, as Max Frink, Sinner’s trainer and manager, splashed him with ice water. Then the bell rang again, and Sinner spat twice and jumped up and skipped forward, already moving (as the young reporter from Boxing would put it) ‘like a dozen kind admirers were trying to present him with a garland of poison ivy’. Pock was trudging along with his heels down on the canvas, while Sinner was still bouncing up almost on his toes. They circled each other, and Pock made a few tired jabs that he knew Sinner would dodge, then got a hard right hook to his kidneys in return — he’d dribble blood in his sleep tonight, wake up with stained underwear like a girl — feinted, blocked, feinted, and finally reached way down to thump Sinner in the balls.

(This, anyway, is how I’m almost sure it must have happened.)

Even Frink, veteran of a hundred Spitalfields street brawls, winced and clenched his teeth then, but Sinner, who’d actually taken the punch, merely grunted. Rage did come to his eyes, but that was nothing to do with pain: Sinner and pain were long estranged. Instead, Frink thought to himself, it was Sinner’s realisation that he might be about to be cheated out of his knock-out. As the crowd jeered, delighted with this bit of slapstick, Frink looked down at the referee (who in those days stood outside the ring, surrounded by a mob of gamblers determined to make his decisions for him), hoping Mottle would have that brittle squint of a referee who knows he’s missed something important but is too stubborn to admit his error — two times out of three you could stick a thumb in the other man’s eye and not get caught — but to Frink’s dismay Mottle was barking, ‘Foul! Foul!’

‘Nah, piss off,’ said Sinner. ‘That weren’t a foul. It didn’t hurt. Fight’s still on.’

‘Below the belt,’ insisted Mottle. There was already a scuffle starting among the gamblers behind him. Pock flung his hands in the air and shook his head as if to protest his innocence.

‘It didn’t even hurt,’ said Sinner, glaring down at Mottle. ‘Prick couldn’t hurt me. Put a cobblestone in his glove and he couldn’t hurt me.’

‘We won’t have any cheating here.’ Mottle looked over to the judges’ table for confirmation.

‘I want to fucking fight. They all want me to fight.’ Sinner turned to shout at his trainer. ‘Frink, tell him! This is a piss-take!’

‘You’ve won, son. Rules is rules.’

‘Bollocks to this.’

Mottle nodded to the announcer. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, Seth “Sinner” Roach!’ There was a sarcastic, resentful cheer from a few of the crowd, and then they went back to hooting and booing, even louder now, no longer in mockery but in anger. They’d been cheated, just like Sinner, and before long an itchy discordant drone would start to rise up to the ceiling of Premierland, a threat you didn’t hear with your ears but with your stomach and fists. Tonight there would be knives out all the way down Commercial Road, Pock thought, not just the gamblers but everyone who’d lost out on what they’d paid for. It didn’t matter how good the first three fights were if someone spoiled the fourth — even worse than when you let a girl change her mind before you finished with her. He began to wonder if he’d made a mistake, but then he spotted Myrna in the third row, putting on lipstick with a compact mirror. He’d tell her that he’d been winning, that he’d been unlucky. Barnaby Pock, still technically unbeaten after nineteen matches, he thought. His head hurt.

‘Hold on, hold on,’ said Frink, hurrying over to where Mottle stood, pulling along with him a gangly fellow with a moustache who tonight was Premierland’s house physician (a modest improvement over the days when the best you could hope for was a sticking plaster in the pocket of the referee). ‘Let the doctor look at him. If the doctor says he’s all right, then you have to let him fight.’

‘I do not,’ said Mottle.

‘He wants to fight.’

‘I’m afraid I can’t possibly conduct a proper examination out here,’ said the doctor.

‘Have a feel!’ shouted one of the gamblers.

‘Are you wearing any sort of protective apparatus, Mr Roach?’ said the doctor.

‘He wears a strap,’ said Frink.

‘Only a strap! Perhaps you or your trainer are acquainted with my own line of Fistic Armatures? No? Because I assure you, gentlemen, if all pugilists were to be supplied with this inexpensive invention, there would be no question of halting a match simply because a blow had gone astray. They are impregnable.’

‘Just have a look at the boy,’ said Frink.

‘It won’t make any difference, Mel,’ said Mottle.

‘Quite comfortable, too,’ said the doctor. ‘Mr Roach, I dare say you would take a — my goodness — well, I dare say a size ten. And you, Mr Pock … I estimate a size four. Or perhaps a three.’

‘Do you want a fucking knock?’ said Pock.

‘That is a very felicitous offer, sir, since I happen to be wearing one of my Fistic Armatures at this very moment. In fact, I challenge any one of you gentlemen to strike me in that region. Like St Stephen, I shall feel no pain.’

‘I want to fight,’ said Sinner in a voice like steel handcuffs. ‘They’re waiting. They didn’t come to see a fucking pantomime.’

‘Anyone?’ said the doctor.

‘Come on, mate, you’ve won,’ said Pock.

‘Surely you will be good enough to test out my invention, sir?’ the doctor said, gesturing to the boy from Boxing , who had pushed his way through the gamblers with his notebook held over his head like a lantern.

Frink studied Sinner’s face, hoping the boy’s rage might scuttle back into the gloom behind his eyes. But Sinner was still angry — he hadn’t given up yet.

‘Do you think Mr Roach was winning, Mr Pock?’ stuttered the reporter.

‘I beseech you,’ said the doctor.

‘Come on, now, Seth,’ said Frink. ‘Next time.’